Projects Profile
Project Title
Development of power laws and Bayesian belief networks for a digital forensics software system
Partnership
Dr Richard Overill from King's College London
Dr K P Chow from University of Hong Kong
Project Aim
Research carried out at King’s and the Hong Kong University (HKU) have demonstrated the feasibility for development of novel digital forensic software.
This project will draw on the research expertise from both King’s and HKU and will transform the mathematical methodology and development expertise into a novel digital software system of digital forensic tool for fighting digital crime. The software will contains a variety of generic template for various categories of key digital crimes and can be tailored to provide specific tracing and analysis capability for digital traces of digital crimes committed over a digital network system.
Inspiration for the projects
Digital (or cyber) crimes spread across many aspects of modern life and take a variety of forms which leave little visible evidence for conventional forensic technologies to trace. Therefore effective digital forensic tools are urgently required by law enforcement agencies across the world.
However, although digital crimes take many different forms the vast majority can be classified into a limited number of categories. For example, law enforcement officials and University researchers in Hong Kong have identified five specific digital crimes which occur so frequently in East Asia that they account for around 80% of all digital crimes. It is possible to construct a generic template Bayesian network for each of the five crimes. Each network describes the evidential traces whose presence supports each of the sub-hypotheses needed to establish that a particular digital crime has been committed.
Research at King’s College London (King’s) has shown that the Bayesian prior probabilities associated with each evidential trace can be derived using the well-understood mathematical tools of complexity theory, information theory and statistical theory. By combining these two strands of research expertise together synergistically we are aiming to develop a prototype software system containing complete generic digital crime templates which digital forensic examiners can use to validate before a court of law the probability with which the digital evidential traces support the prosecution case.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The outcome of the project will produce a marketable prototype of novel software expert systems for digital crime tracing and evidence analysis, which can is licensed to information security companies. The software system will be highly desirable to forensic labs, law enforcement agencies, and other information security companies dealing with digital crimes
The technology has attracted strong industry interests. Numerous of enquiries have been received, and some company has expressed keen interests in accessing the technology upon the project completion.
